Engineering measurements of transportation corridors such as highways, railways, airport runways and others and complementary measurements for asset management are important to providing safe, efficient transportation. The speed, accuracy and reliability available to generate these measurements are currently inadequate to meet the evolving engineering, safety and asset management needs of federal, state, and local transportation agencies as well as other entities. Specific characteristics of the measurements required include accurate three-dimensional position referencing synchronized with accurate measurements of transportation corridor elements. A need therefore exists to collect and generate engineering and asset management data using an innovative, comprehensive and cost effective measurement system. The system needs to measure features along the transportation corridor that are on, over, adjacent to and under the travel path.
A need exists for an apparatus, method and integrated system for accurately measuring transportation corridor geometry and asset presence, location and condition. The measurements are collected using a mobile vehicle platform. This provides required measurement data, (including substantially improved data sampling) while reducing the risk and cost due to manual field data collection and minimizing traffic interference.